Twelve Trials
by iwentnorthdowneasthastings
Summary: This is a case fic. There will be 12 cases in all. There may be Sherlock/John later, if I can work up the courage to do so. Rated M, just in case.


Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade stood surrounded by flashing lights and difficult people. He massaged his temples, desperately trying to block out excess noise. He opened his eyes and decided to turn around to face one of the most grisly cases he'd ever been presented with.

Anderson had just finished collecting whatever samples he could find from the dessicated corpse and stood back, shaking his head.

"I've gotten all I could find, sir," he said through his mask. "There just wasn't much to go with."

Lestrade nodded grimly, not taking his eyes off the scene. "Understandable," he replied, pulling out his phone, contemplating the inevitable.

"You're not thinking of.. calling him, are you?" Anderson murmured, just loud enough for the DI to hear. "This is cut and dry, sir."

Lestrade rounded on him. "Cut and dead, more like, Anderson," he spat, "And if your dodgy methods of tracking down serial killers will work this time, I'm all for it, but until you get me something useful out of those bloody stupid experiments of yours, I'll call whoever the hell I choose."

Anderson narrowed his eyes and stalked off with his bags of dirt and skin samples towards the waiting Forensics van.

Lestrade sighed and knelt at the body. The woman laying there had been stripped of her skin, leaving only the deep red bulges of muscle behind. There was no blood on the crime scene, save for little pools of it on the ground beneath her.

"You rang?" broke out a low voice behind him. Lestrade jumped, being torn from his torrent of thinking, and turned around to face a tall, lanky man who's entire figure was covered with a blue coat and, if it were possible, a huge smirk.

"Not yet, but I was about to," he replied. "How did you...?"

"I was in the neighborhood," replied the man hurriedly, pulling on plastic gloves. "Saw your car and assumed you needed help."

"Why would I need help? We've got this," Lestrade said, being incredibly convincing.

The man gave him a sideways look and turned up his lip slightly. "Doubt it," he said. He raised his arm in the air, sending his scarf to the side. "Watson! Over here!" he cried, turning back towards the body.

Lestrade huffed and stepped aside, yanking up the police tape to let Doctor John Watson into the crime scene to stand next to his colleague.

"Hello, Detective," he said amiably, extending his hand to the flustered man.

"Good evening, Doctor Watson," he replied, less irritably than before. He could deal with Sherlock Holmes as well as, okay better than, the next man, but having John around made it infinitely more bearable.

"John, what can you tell from the body?" intoned Sherlock, clasping his hands behind him and fixing John with a piercing gaze.

John licked his lips and took Lestrade's place, kneeling next to the ill fated woman. He ran his eyes over her head, torso, extremities, and noted the clean stripping of the skin.

"Looks like someone knew what they were doing," he began. "You see the lines, here," he pointed to a spot on the arm, "and here," another point near her knee, "there should be a jagged edge where the joints were, but that's not the case."

"We've had two more like this in the past week," Lestrade put in.

"Is there anything different about this one?" Sherlock asked, bending down to examine the body opposite John.

"Nothing so far, except that someone actually called this one in," Lestrade replied. "We got a call from the woman across the street telling us she saw a old car pulling up next to the alleyway and dumping something out, then driving away like a bat out of hell." He pointed to a house across the street. The blinds were open and there was an officer talking to an old woman in carpet slippers, who was speaking animatedly.

Sherlock said nothing, but focused himself on finding something out of the ordinary. Something more out of the ordinary than a skinned woman in an alleyway.

"Ah!" he cried after a few minutes. Lestrade, who was on the phone near the edge of the scene mumbled a few words, shoved his cell in his pocket, and jogged back.

"What is it? What have you found?"

"See here, on the very last distal phalanx," he pointed to her pinkie finger and looked up at the two men. Lestrade shook his head. John was a bit quicker to catch on.

"There's still a bit of skin there," he said, not taking his eyes off the spot.

"Honestly, what do they pay you for?" Sherlock shot at the Detective, who just rolled his eyes in return.

"Well what does that mean? He didn't finish?" Lestrade asked, throwing his hands up. "He got sloppy? It doesn't tell us anything."

Sherlock didn't respond, as telling Lestrade that everything told you something was pointless, and continued to examine the finger.

"John, look at this cut," he said, pushing the finger towards the doctor. "What do you see?"

John resituated his position, putting both knees on the ground and leaning forward towards the proffered digit. At first, the bit of skin looked ordinary, as if someone got in a rush and forgot that bit. John could only blame the next revelation that came to him as Sherlock rubbing off on him in the last few months.

"Look at the edges of the cut!" he exclaimed. "There's no way a scalpel could do that, it looks bloody ragged!"

Sherlock smiled, a genuine thing that only happened when the doctor actually observed something. It happened other times as well, but this is not about those times. Not yet.

"Exactly," he said, standing up and brushing dirt from his knees. "Whatever instrument skinned this woman, it wasn't sharp."

"Sherlock," Lestrade drew out, comprehension dawning on him, "was this girl dead or alive when she was skinned?"

John and Sherlock exchanged grim looks.

"I'll need to examine the body when it has been taken into the morgue," said Sherlock, stripping off his gloves with a flourish. "Phone me when she's there."

John tore his eyes away from the body and looked around at Sherlock, taking that as his cue to duck back under the police tape.

"Sherlock," Lestrade called after them, a note of desperation in his voice. He seemed unable to form anymore words after his realization. He shook his head and waved them off, turning back to an officer who was taking notes on the scene.

221B Baker Street was more than it's usual state of untidiness that evening. Sherlock had just gotten back from the morgue and was laden with pictures, samples, old yellowing medical tomes and-

"Sherlock why do you have a book about Africa?" John asked curiously, picking out a thin book with the words "Tribes of Africa" emblazoned on the cover out of the pile.

Sherlock looked over for a moment at the worn book and continued to straighten files on his desk.

"Research," he replied, opening his laptop and spreading out pictures.

"I see," John said, tossing it back onto the stack and heading towards the kitchen. "Tea?"

"Please." It took three seconds exactly for Sherlock to become completely absorbed in his work. John looked over at the man and sighed, fumbling with the kettle.

The tea that came to rest next to his laptop grew cold.

At some point during the night, John woke up with a start. The entire flat was freezing and he barely had a sheet over him. Shaking, he rolled out of his bed and started towards the door, idly wondering where his blankets had gone.

The flat moved around him. The floor underneath his bare feet groaned and yielded to his movements. The walls stared at him without making him feel watched. Frost formed on the windows, the glass shivering and contracting beneath the cold.

In the sitting room, Sherlock was huddled in front of his laptop, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, most of which were John's.

The owner of most of those blankets let out a puff of air that barely dissipated in front of him, lingering around for a moment so as not to miss the yelling that was sure to ensue.

"Sherlock," he began, trembling with effort, "Do you know how fucking cold it is?"

"Haven't noticed," said the spindly man, who was scribbling away furiously at a sheet of paper that, quite frankly, looked as if enough scribbling had happened to it already.

"I'll bet," John said, unraveling one of the larger duvets from around his friend and piled himself on the couch. "What time is it?"

"Around three," Sherlock replied, his attention now on the smaller pile of books that he hadn't flipped through yet.

"Have you gotten any further?" John asked.

"Please," Sherlock scoffed. John shrugged in defeat, still unable to coax himself out of the swaddle of warmth he'd made for himself to riffle through the array of papers near Sherlock.

As if Sherlock knew how comfortable he was, he suddenly called for him. John sighed, knowing it would have ended sooner rather than later, and stood up, dragging the covers with him. He craned over Sherlock's shoulder to look at a picture of the woman in the morgue. There was a close up picture of the finger that Sherlock had pointed out. John picked it up and stared at it intently.

The hand, along with the rest of the body, had been divested from the muscle below. There was a picture of her pinkie finger held out from the rest, to show the minute amount of skin still clinging heroically to it. The edge of the patch was ragged and uneven.

"What was she skinned with...?" John muttered, mainly to himself. Sherlock was watching John's every move, calculating his different facial expressions. After a few minutes of this, Sherlock picked up the worn book about African tribes.

"The way the girls were treated reminded me of an ancient African custom," he began, flipping through the pages. "The Maasai people, located mainly in Eastern Africa. The rite of passage for young men consists of them killing a lion. They hunt it, skin it, wear the mane of their kill, then burn it."

John looked at the page Sherlock indicated. "So, do you think the killer is," he paused, glancing at Sherlock, "a young man of East African descent, looking to find his place in London?"

"Don't be dense," he replied, amassing a disgruntled look from his friend. "Merely a man who wishes to feel powerful. A middle aged man, down on his luck, most likely psychotic, looking to vent his frustration out on innocent people."

"Any luck on what the cutting tool was made out of?" John asked.

"I took a sample of skin to observe under a microscope," Sherlock said, extracting a photo of what John could only assume were the results of that observation.

"It looks like bone fragments," John said quietly. "Can you tell what kind from this?"

Sherlock sighed. "I'm afraid that's where my deductions end." He set the photo down and rubbed his eyes.

"Give me a cigarette," he more or less demanded.

"No," said John simply. He straightened up and stretched his lower back, which was practically screaming in agony from the prolonged uncomfortable slouching position. "I'll make you some tea instead."

Sherlock exhaled dramatically and meandered to the couch, falling down on it in a display of extravagant discord.

"I can't think like this," he lamented to the man in the kitchen.

"You couldn't stop thinking if your life depended on it," John called back.

Sherlock had nothing to say to that. He focused on the ceiling instead. Theories ran through his mind at incredible speeds, each one as unlikely as the next. He'd seen murders like this, the bodies rid of their outer organ, bare and bland and a perfect display of human defiance. These bodies were different. Their skin had been shed while the victim was still breathing. It was obvious that the victims had most likely slipped into unconsciousness during the process, but all the same. The killer possessed an incredible amount of malice, unlike anything Sherlock had ever thought possible from a human being.

His musings were interrupted by a steaming cup of tea being placed on the table and a man who was moving his legs, unsuccessfully, to a spot perhaps two feet above where he wanted them to be. In a manner of seconds, they were back in their original place, albeit this time, they were resting across John's lap.

John sipped at his tea, apparently in thought.

"I'm not a psychologist," he began, "I only deal with physical illnesses. But I was required to take a course in Psychology in order to become a doctor. The mental disorders always stuck out to me, particularly the one concerning delusions of grandeur."

Sherlock brought himself out of his reverie to listen to John's words. "And?" he prompted.

John looked at him, surprised he was paying attention. "Well," he coughed, reaching across the miles of legs to set his tea down on the table, "I mean, very few people are actually diagnosed with it, since most people just suffer from excessive pride. But in some cases, one will legitimately believe that nothing can hurt them. That they are invincible."

Sherlock sat up slightly, leaning on his elbows and frowning in thought. He grabbed up the pictures of the woman's pinkie finger and the enhanced image of the bone shards that the knife was assumed to be made out of, looking between the two.

"What are you thinking?" John asked after a moment.

"I don't know yet," Sherlock replied. "I need more data." He tossed the pictures back on the table and lay back, this time closing his eyes.

"Do you think you'll sleep tonight?" John asked.

Sherlock grunted and didn't speak for the next nine and a half hours.


End file.
